“And Absalom Ricker’s old mother, that’s mourning bitter because she left her coral pin with a dog on behind on the Flats that her husband give it to her when they was engaged ... and we knew she was married, but not one of us had thought of her as human enough ever to have been engaged. And Mis’ Haskitt with her new black dress, and Mis’ Dole with her clean-ironed clothes bars, and Mis’ Bitty Marshall with her baby and her little chickens and her lace curtain, and Bitty with his grocery store. “Lord, we thank thee for letting us see them, and all the rest of ’em, _close up to_. “We’re glad that now just because the Mad river flowed into the homes that we ain’t often been in or ever, if any, and drove up to us the folks that we’ve never thought so very much about, we’re glad to get the feeling that I had when I heard our grocery-boy knew how to hand-carve wood and our mail man was announced to sing a bass solo, that we never thought they had any regular lives, separate from milk and mail. “And let us keep that feeling, O Lord! Amen.” And I says right out of the fullness of the lump in my throat: “Don’t these folks seem so much more folks than they ever did before?” Mis’ Merriman that was near me, answered up: “Why, of course,” she says, “they’re in trouble. Ain’t you no compassion to you?” “Some,” says I, modest, “but where’d that compassion come from? It didn’t just grow up now, did it?--like Abraham’s gourd, or whoever it was that had one?” “Why, no,” she says irritable. “It’s in us all, of course. But it takes trouble to bring it out.” “Why does it take trouble to bring it out?” I says and I looked ahead at us all a-streaming down Daphne Street, just like it was some nice human doings. “Why does it? Here’s us all, and it only takes a minute to get us all going, with our hands in our pockets and lumps in our throats and our sympathy just as busy as it ever was for our little family in-four-walls affairs. Now,” I says, “that love and sympathy, and them pockets and them throats are all here, just the same, day after day. What I want to know is, what are them things doing with themselves when nobody is in active trouble?” And then I said my creed: “O, when we get to working as hard to keep things from happening as we work when it’s happened, won’t living be fun?” “Well, of course we couldn’t prevent floods,” says Mis’ Merriman, “and them natural things.” “Shucks!” I says, simple. “If we knew as much about frosts and hurricanes as we do about comets--we’d show you. And do you think it’s any harder to bank in a river than it is to build a subway--_if_ there was the same money in it for the company?”